In broadcast disks (S. Acharya et al., “Broadcast disks: data management of asymmetric communication environments,” in Proc. ACM SIGACT/SIGMOD Symposium on Principles of Database Systems, 1995), a powerful server broadcasts data items to mobile clients awaiting their desired items (e.g., public data like stock quotes, or user data like an address book). In an arbitrary broadcasting schedule, a client may have to “busy-wait” for its item, i.e., actively listen to the server until its item is broadcast, thus wasting much battery power. If the broadcast schedule is perfectly periodic, i.e., each item i is broadcast precisely every pi time units for some pi, then the client can switch on its radio exactly when needed. However, an egalitarian round-robin schedule (which is perfectly periodic) is not satisfactory: a general solution must also accommodate for a different periodicity requirement for each item, since different items may have different popularity levels with clients, different expiration times, different QoS levels, etc.
Broadcast disks are just one example among many where it is desirable to have low jitter, namely the spacing between consecutive occurrences of the same item should be as equal as possible. Another example from the wireless world is the Sniff Mode in Bluetooth. In this case, slave devices can shut off their transceivers except for a certain time every once in a while, when they listen to find out whether the master device is trying to contact them. If the master uses a schedule with low jitter, it would help improving battery lifetime in the slave devices.